


Frayed Threads of Sanity

by Electric_Apple



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 01:16:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20349952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Electric_Apple/pseuds/Electric_Apple
Summary: He pulls her out of a burning house in Wilmington, Nebraska, this tiny bit of a girl who’s managed to partially sever the heads of at least two of the three family members she’s killed.





	Frayed Threads of Sanity

He pulls her out of a burning house in Wilmington, Nebraska, this tiny bit of a girl who’s managed to partially sever the heads of at least two of the three family members she’s killed. There’d been a nasty son-of-a-bitch in her at the time and it’s taken him the better part of three days to exorcise it; just before the bastard thing pours from her mouth in a cloud of black dust, the oil heaters scattered throughout the house ignite in a series of loud _pops_. The fire spreads quickly and the curtains are ablaze before he’s really registered that it’s happened. There are shadows dancing among the flames and his blood runs cold when he sees them because he’s heard about fire demons but he’s never encountered one and fuck if he knows how to fight one off.   
  
He’s been awake for nearly 72 hours, he has an unconscious civilian still bound hand and foot inside a chalk circle, and he’s been stripped down to the bare minimum of his on-hand arsenal.   
  
So he does the only thing he can do.  
  
He runs.  
  
He bends down to sling the girl’s battered body over his shoulder, cracked rib screaming in protest, and snatches up the backpack containing what remains of his supplies. His truck is parked in the front driveway; he covers the distance at a run, throws the girl bodily into the cabin, climbs in beside her, and floors it.  
  
He doesn’t take his foot off the gas till they’re 100 miles clear of the town’s border.   
* * *  
  
This kind of job is more Jim’s thing than John’s. It’s not that John doesn’t deal with demons, necessarily, because God knows he’s come across more than a few throughout the years. Sought them out on more than one occasion, and managed to put most of them down – practise, he told Joshua once, for the day he catches up with the fucker that killed his wife. But this sort of thing, a long term possession and a violent, complicated exorcism, well, he’s not really cut out to deal with it. Not the process itself; he can recite the Latin and throw the holy water with the best of them, and while at times his soul feels black and twisted, it’s not yet black enough that he can’t save someone else’s. No, it’s the clean up he doesn’t like – the broken body and shattered mind that is generally all that is left of the person released.  
  
Yet Jim tossed him this job and because it was Jim and John has never yet been able to refuse a request from him, he took it. Tracked the demon, now encased in the body of twenty-three year old Gabby Adams, from Oklahoma to Nebraska. Goaded her – it – onto a ring of chalk and managed to tie the girl’s body down in spite of the inhuman strength the demon gave her. The process was not with cost; his rib burns and the bruises are still darkening on his stomach and upper thigh. The exorcism itself is not an experience he intends to look back on. Write it down, let it go, and pray that it stays the hell out of his dreams. And now he’s here, Gabby (or what’s left of her) slumped bleeding and unconscious in the passenger seat of his truck, and he has no fucking idea what to do next.   
  
He keeps a steady pattern as he drives, eyes flicking from the rear-view mirror to the windshield to the girl next to him and back to rear-view mirror. It’s a habit as ingrained as the salt circles he used to draw around his sons as they slept.   
  
Two weeks. He needs to keep her out of sight and out of danger for two weeks, until Jim returns and is able to start the painful process of reconstructing her life. Another reason he hadn’t been keen on this job; keeping himself and his boys out of sight when occasion calls for it is something he knows instinctively how to do, but toting around an injured civilian wanted for three counts of murder? That’s just asking for trouble.  
  
Adrenaline keeps him driving; allows him to avoid making an immediate decision.  
  
She regains consciousness sometime in the early hours of the morning. He feels it before he sees it; the subtle change in her breathing, the sudden tension in her body. A few more minutes, and her eyes struggle open, heavy and unfocused. He watches as the post-exorcism stupor fades, to be replaced an moment later by sheer terror as she realises where she is, who she’s with.   
  
“Hey now,” he says, as softly as he can. “It’s okay, girlie. You’re okay.”  
  
“Is it gone?” She can barely get the words out.  
  
“It’s gone.”  
  
Her entire body thrums with nervous energy. She draws in on herself, curling her legs up on the seat, clasping her arms around her knees, resting her cheek on her forearm. Trying to take up as little space as possible; a form of self-protection as intrinsic as the beat of her heart.   
  
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he tells her in that same soft tone, wanting to reach out and touch her shoulder but knowing absolutely that the movement would send her scrambling back from him in fear.  
  
She nods once in acknowledgement then turns her face away from him.  
  
  
* * *  
John’s adrenaline rush disappears abruptly a few hours later, and he finds a motel off the highway, far enough away from the main road to give them a bit of cover but not so far that they can’t be gone in a hurry if they need to.   
  
Because he can see the car from the office, he leaves the girl where she is, still curled around herself on the passenger seat, while he goes in to book and pay. He leaves the engine running and the heater going while he’s gone, because she’s still shaking. He returns a few minutes later, key dangling absently from one hand, to drive them the few metres to the door of the room.  
  
He cuts the engine, and turns to the girl. “Alright, listen. We’re going to stop here for the night. Chances are this place is safe, but I’m going to do a quick sweep, just to make sure. I want you to stay here til I get back, okay?”  
  
After several long moments, she nods.  
  
He reaches behind his seat to grab the bag containing the salt and holy water, along with a handful of weapons, and goes inside. He knows instantly that the place is clean – he’s got something of a sense about these things, now – so his check is more perfunctory than necessity, before he drops the bag and goes back outside to get the girl.  
  
She shies away from him when he goes to take her arm to help her out of the truck but she’s barely managed to swing her legs over the edge of the seat when she falls forward in a sort-of half faint. He catches her before she can slide down to the ground; lifts her into his arms in spite of her soft cry of protest. “Take it easy there, girlie. Let’s get you inside and cleaned up, hey?”  
  
She stares at him, eyes wild and desperate, but doesn’t make a sound as he carries her inside the hotel room, depositing her gently on the bed farthest from the door.  
  
He spends a few minutes securing the room – salting the windows and door, reloading the shotgun, tracing a series of Sumerian symbols into the doorframe.   
  
When he turns back to the girl, he finds her sitting huddled against the headboard, knees drawn up to her chin. “Who are you?” Her voice is low, a hoarse whisper: all that is left after the three days of cursing and screaming and inhuman growling the demon forced through her throat.  
  
“John Winchester.” It’s the best explanation he has.  
  
“How did you know to – about _it_?”  
  
“It’s what I do,” he says simply. He digs through his duffle to find a clean shirt; he turns up a pair of sweat pants too and he offers them too, though she’ll likely drown in them. “Here. Go clean up.”  
  
She glances at the open bathroom door, eyes widening when she sees the window. “Can it –”  
  
“I salted it,” he cuts her off, not unkindly. “You’ll be safe. Go on, clean up.” She reeks of blood and vomit and the tang of sulphur and a lifetime ago it might have made him gag, but now he wants a few minutes to himself – time to regroup, regather his thoughts, come up with a plan of some kind – more than he wants to get rid of the smell. More than he notices the smell, in fact.  
  
After a few moments, she takes the clothes from him and disappears into the bathroom.  
  
Prudence has him pouring a double line of salt across the door and the room’s only window: there’s a heating vent above the tv and he prises the cover off it, climbing up on the tv stand to pour a thin line around the inside of the vent. Then he pulls the beds out from against the wall and pours a circle of salt around each of them. Because hell, he wants to protect the girl but he’s not fucking stupid either.  
  
She showers for a long time.  
  
He doesn’t suppose she’s any hungrier than he is so she waits for her to get out of the bathroom before offering to microwave one of the cans of soup he has stashed in his duffle for situations not unlike this one; she declines with a short shake of her head. He pulls back the covers on the bed she was sitting on earlier. “Here. Why don’t you get some sleep?”  
  
“How do I – what if it comes back?”  
  
He nods at the small arsenal on the bedside table (holy water, crucifix, a shotgun loaded with consecrated iron) and the salt on the floor. “It won’t. Can’t. But if it does, I’ll be ready for it.”   
  
The cliché is removed by the sheer confidence with which he says it, and she accepts it, nodding tiredly in agreement. She climbs into the bed, rolls away from him and curls up with the blankets pulled tightly over her head.  
  
* * *  
He’s expecting the nightmares but it still comes as something of a shock when her screams tear him from sleep sometime in the evening.  
  
She’s a tangle of blankets and thrashing limbs and long brown hair on the other bed: he crosses the small space between the beds and reaches down to try to shake her awake.  
  
She kicks out at him, landing a good one on his upper thigh before he manages to get his arms around her, bringing her off the bed and up against him in a firm grip she no longer has inhuman strength to fight. “Hey, hey. Easy now girlie, easy. It’s a nightmare. Just a nightmare.”  
  
Recognition flashes across her face and she stops fighting him, momentarily still before twisting suddenly in his arms.  
  
He recognises the movement for what it is and reaches behind him, grabbing for the bin tucked under the nightstand between their bed because linen be damned, it’s her dignity he’s trying to protect. He finds it, and thrusts it into her hands just in time.   
  
She curls herself around the bin and retches violently. There’s not a lot left in her stomach, she hasn’t eaten for almost four days now, but she throws up what little there is and dry-heaves for a long time after that, till at last it stops and she stills, resting her forehead against the rim of the bin, her breathing coming in shallow, panting sobs.  
  
She’s still sitting half-in his lap and once he’s sure that she’s not going to be sick again, he reaches around her to take the bin and place it back down on the floor. “Better?”  
  
She nods, shakily. “I’m sorry. I was…I couldn’t _move_…”  
  
“Nightmare,” he says. “Understandable.”  
  
She brushes her hair back from her face with a shaking hand. “No, not then…before, when it was _in_ me. I couldn’t move my own body.”   
  
He doesn’t answer that, mostly because he can’t begin to fathom what it would be like to have your own body working against you. Instead he eases back till he’s leaning against the headboard, drawing her with him.   
  
She falls asleep an hour later with her head on his shoulder, her body cradled carefully against his the way he once cradled his boys when they were sick or injured or scared.   
  
This is the first night she spends in his arms.  
  
* * *  
John wakes at sunrise, muscles aching with the awkward position he slept in. He eases Gabby out of his arms and lies her back against the mattress, slipping from the bed as quietly as he can. When he returns from the bathroom a few minutes later she’s awake, sitting on the edge of the bed.  
  
He smiles a _good morning_ at her.   
  
Her answering smile is completely devoid of humour. “I feel like I’ve been run over.”  
  
He nods, because she looks like it. “You hungry?”  
  
If possible, her face grows even paler. “No.” She curls her fingers into tight fists around the hem of his t-shirt. “I, uh…Beck’s dead.”  
  
He’s not sure if it’s a statement or a question, so he nods again. Is expecting, perhaps, tears or hysterics or even a renewed bout of vomiting, but she just shudders, once, and swallows heavily. “My parents, too.”  
  
He looks her straight in the eye. “I’m sorry.”  
  
She draws her legs up, resting her chin on her knees. “Me too,” she whispers. “Me too.”  
  
* * *  
It’s a toss-up: do they stay where they are, bunk down for a week and stay out of sight, or do they keep moving, get themselves as far away as possible from Nebraska and the place of her possession? The decision to get moving makes itself when the midday news broadcasts Gabby’s face beside the smoking ruins of her house and the photos of her dead family.  
  
* * *  
She’s standing in the bathroom doorway, his sweatpants and t-shirt hanging loosely from her freshly-showered body. “How long does it take for the marks to go?”  
  
John looks up from the rifle he’s cleaning. “What marks?”  
  
She lifts the hem of her shirt slowly to reveal her stomach: there are six intricate symbols carved into her skin around her navel. John’s heard about marks like these but he’s never seen them. Yet another reason he’s in a little over his head here; another reason to curse Jim, silently, for dropping him in the shit. He puts down the rifle and starts towards her; reaches out a hand to touch his fingertips, very lightly, to the mark just above the line of her jeans.   
  
It’s hot beneath his touch, which concerns him. The wounds are also tacky with freshly-clotted blood, which is a bigger concern because if they formed at the time of possession, they’re several weeks old now. “How often do they bleed?”  
  
“They didn’t, before.” She shrugs slightly, moving to lower her shirt.   
  
He catches her wrist. “No, don’t. I need to clean them.”  
  
“I’ve already done it.”  
  
He shakes his head. “Not like this.”  
  
Salt in any wound stings like a son-of-a-bitch; salt mixed with holy water poured into a demon’s wound is almost unbearable. He knows this from excruciating personal experience –broke Caleb’s nose, the one time he’s had to endure it himself. So he warns her, because how can he not? But Gabby, having placed a few towels down first, lies back on the bed without comment. She refuses the painkiller he offers her.  
  
She tolerates the process as best she can, which is to say that she curses and bucks involuntarily as John pours the solution over her stomach, but the inhuman strength he experienced during the exorcism has gone now and he pins her easily for the few minutes it takes him. He’s not surprised when the wounds start to smoke. The sizzling sound as her skin bubbles and burns beneath the solution turns his stomach. He waits till it stops before dressing the area with a thick pad soaked in both antiseptic and anaesthetic cream. He presses the final piece of tape down against her skin, then looks up at her for the first time, reaching up to smooth loose strands of her hair from her face. “You did good, girlie.”  
  
She nods, but she trembles beneath his hand and there are tears rolling – silently, terribly – down her face.  
  
* * *  
She can’t spend the next two weeks in his sweatpants and shirt. It makes her too conspicuous; they hang off her tiny frame and even without her pale face and broken eyes, the clothes would draw unwanted attention.  
  
They stop at the next town with a Wallmart and Gabby spends all of two minutes in the clothing section, John hovering almost-too-close behind her, before grabbing a pair of jeans and an oversized hoodie. It’s John who firsts suggests and then insists that she get the other items: underwear, socks, a thick dark jacket, a beanie and scarf. Toothbrush. Hairbrush. Bands for her ponytail. Shampoo and conditioner and a pack of disposable razors. A non-descript canvass duffle to keep it all in. And, because he knows (from photos and a deep instinct) that the clothes she’s chosen would not have been the clothes she’d worn _before_, he throws a couple of tank tops and close-fitting t-shirts into the pile. In case she finds herself again through her misery and guilt; in case she wants to try. He makes her try on, and get, a pair of hiking boots – they’re cheap pieces of crap but she needs to be able to run if occasion calls for it and the high-heeled boots that she was wearing three days ago aren’t going to cut it.  
  
He pays for it all with a fake credit card.   
  
She doesn’t so much as blink when the checkout guy hands it back to him with a chirpy “Have a good afternoon, Mr McInnes.”  
  
  
* * *  
The guilt and grief of it eat at her.   
  
“Beck’s my _sister_,” she says, as though he doesn’t understand. As though he doesn’t have Kate, or seen Mary with Elizabeth, or for that matter raised his boys since infancy in the symbiotic relationship of their siblinghood.   
  
He doesn’t take the bait, however unintentionally offered. “It wasn’t you,” he says instead, just as he always says.   
  
“But it was my fault. I mean…I could _feel_ it, you know? It was in there, _inside_ me, and I didn’t fight it off. I knew what it wanted to do to Beck, and my parents, and I didn’t stop it. I wasn’t strong enough.” The fingers of her right hand have curled into a tight fist around the bedspread.   
  
“There’s no _didn’t_ here,” John says, measuring his words carefully. “You _couldn’t_ stop it. There’s nothing you could have done – not one damn thing – to stop this from happening. _Nothing_.”  
  
“You’re telling me _no one_ has ever been able to fight it – to stop it doing…?”   
  
The lie doesn’t sit well, but he offers it anyway. “Yeah.”  
  
Her whisper is barely audible. “You could have stopped it.”  
  
And he could tell her that he didn’t stop it all, that his wife burned on the ceiling above their son’s crib because he was neither quick enough nor strong enough to stop it, but there’s little point in sharing that. “Maybe. Point is, it wasn’t me. It was you. And they’re clever, Gabby. A demon gets inside your mind or your body, there’s no limit to the havoc it can wreak. It twists you up till you don’t know where you end and it starts.”  
  
“Does it matter?”  
  
“Gabby…”  
  
“_I can still feel the heat of her blood on my hands_.”  
  
She folds in on herself, slumping forward into his arms, and the low keening in her throat is pure grief: raw, unrestrained. So he holds her and he rocks her, awkwardly, this tiny bit of a girl, and he murmurs _shh, girlie_ against her hair, because there is nothing else he can do.  
  
This is the second night she spends in his arms.   
  
* * *  
He hears about the mauling at the market; two women in their late forties discussing a family dog found in pieces in the neighbour’s yard overnight. He’s preparing to dismiss it as the work of a wildcat – uncommon in these parts, though not entirely unheard of – when one of them remarks that police think it might be the work of a cult member. “The blood was _drained_ from its body,” one says to the other, and his own blood turns cold.   
  
He might be wrong.  
  
He’s probably wrong.  
  
But his senses are screaming at him to get the fuck out of here now.  
  
He’s out the door without conscious thought. The hotel is on the same block and he covers the distance at a run, already calculating the fastest route out of town, the destination most likely to offer shelter.   
  
The door to the hotel room is still locked and the curtains are drawn; he pounds on the door with a closed fist. He waits a scant few moments then pounds on it again before dropping his shoulder and throwing his weight against the door. The lock breaks easily – _piece of shit thing_ – and he bursts into the room, calling Gabby’s name.   
  
He can see at a first glance that she’s not on the bed or curled in the chair, and he calls her name again, starting to panic – the bathroom door opens and Gabby, wrapped in a towel and still dripping water from her shower, calls back in answer.   
  
“Get dressed.” He’s already moving around the room, stuffing their belongings indiscriminately into their duffels. “We gotta go. _Now_, Gabby.”  
  
He’s expecting her to protest, or at least request an explanation, but she turns back into the bathroom to retrieve her clothes without a word, moving with a quiet urgency. She reappears a minute later, dressed, bathroom gear in one hand.   
  
He takes it from her and has their stuff squared away before she gets her first boot on; takes it out to the car and is back in the room collecting the last of the weapons before she finishes with her second. “Let’s go,” he says, and grabs her arm to steer her bodily out to the car, untied boot thumping arrhythmically against the pavement.  
  
They’ve been on the road for twenty minutes before Gabby asks. “It’s him, isn’t it?”  
  
“I think so.”  
  
“I know so,” she says softly, and he turns to her, surprised.  
  
“How can you know?”  
  
Her fingers go to the hem of her t-shirt. She lifts it carefully to reveal the wounds on her stomach. Last night, they were starting to scab over – he knows, because he checked them himself. Now they stand out, red and raw and bleeding, against her pale skin. “It started again this morning,” she tells him. “That’s why I was in the shower.”  
  
He stares at the wounds for a long moment.   
  
Not for the first time, he wonders if he’s going to be able to save this girl at all.  
  
  
* * *  
She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of an anonymous hotel room, a pizza box and the remains of the garlic bread in front of her. “What happens now?” she asks suddenly.  
  
John doesn’t look up at her; continues to file the tip of a silver bullet into shape. “How do you mean?”  
  
“The police must be looking for me. They think I – um, they think I did it. To Beck and my parents. I mean, I did do it, right?” Gabby’s face is pale but determined: she’s going to see this conversation through. “My fingerprints and DNA will be all over their bodies. If they find me, I’ll go to jail for their murders.”  
  
He feels a small swell of admiration for her. She managed to get the words out. Most people don’t. “The police will be looking for you,” he agrees. “That’s why we gotta lay low for a while, till I can get you to Jim’s unnoticed.”  
  
“Who’s Jim?”  
  
“Jim Murphy, a buddy of mine.” He cuts the first arm of the cross onto the end of the bullet. “He’s good. He’ll get you a new social security number, a licence. Set you up somewhere new, where nobody knows you. You’ll get a clean start.”  
  
“Like witness protection.”   
  
“A lot like that, yeah.” The scalpel turns gently in his hand as he moves to etch the second arm of the cross.   
  
She grasps the implications of this immediately. “So I can’t see anyone I know again. My friends, my grandma…”   
  
John shakes his head. “Nope. Not unless you can trust them with what really happened. And you’re the only one who can make that call.”   
  
She makes a small sound in the back of throat – a laugh perhaps, or a sob. “How can I ever explain it?”   
  
“That’s why Jim does what he does.” He’s finished with this bullet – slots it neatly back into the case and picks up the next one.   
  
“So there are others like me, then?”  
  
“Yeah.” His file is getting dull and he makes a mental note to pick up a new one next time he stocks up. The bullet gleams between his fingers as he works.   
  
“Good God,” she murmurs, and he’s not sure if it’s disbelief or relief in her voice. “How many?”  
  
He’s lost count over the years – has probably seen a dozen or more go through Jim in the last decade. “A few. Not a lot, but enough.”  
  
Gabby uncurls herself; stands up abruptly to cross to the sink, filling a glass with water. “How often does it happen again?” she asks, and the tremor in her hands as she lifts the glass betrays the fear of his answer.  
  
He doesn’t bother pretending that he doesn’t know what she’s asking. “I don’t have exact figures. Maybe a third of people. There’s some who say that an initial possession makes a person more susceptible to re-possession.”  
  
“Can you tell…which third, I mean.”  
  
There’s not a lot of point in mincing words. She’s a clever kid, she’ll confirm his response with Jim and the pastor’s not going to lie about it. “No. Not really.” An exorcism can be only a temporary reprieve, many of the fuckers claw their way back out of hell and fight for the body they’d once claimed.   
  
He doesn’t say this aloud, but Gabby nods as though she can hear him think it, then nods again as though it confirms something she’s been thinking for a while now.  
  
* * *  
They leave more than one town abruptly when the wounds on her stomach begin to bleed. The days turn slowly into a week and the nightmares are getting worse, not better, and she thrashes and screams and vomits up what little food she gets down during the day. And he still can’t reach Jim, though he tries almost hourly because he can feel her slipping away, losing the will to fight the terror and grief of it, losing the will to care. So he sleeps with her in his arms now, the bed encased in salt and Gabby encased in what little strength his body can give her, but she comes awake with tears wet on her face and her hands clutched in his shirt.  
  
“I feel it,” she whispers against his neck. “My blood _hums_ with it. It’s not going to let me go.”  
  
His arms tighten around her. “I’m going to stop it, Gabby. Everything I can do…”  
  
But they both know, now, that he can’t.  
  
* * *  
The end, when it comes, comes quickly.  
  
He’s in the bathroom when he hears it, the familiar _click-clack_ as the safety on his Glock is released and the first round of the magazine chambers.  
  
He’s moving before conscious thought, knowing absolutely that the threat comes from within the salt circle and not without but knowing, too, that he’s too late, that the muzzle is already in her mouth and her finger is already depressing the trigger.   
  
He gets there in time to catch her body as it slumps back against the pillows.   
  
  
* * *  
He buries her in Wyoming, in an old small-town cemetery that hasn’t been used for close to a century.   
  
John and Caleb dig the grave together, and John lowers her body carefully into it, wrapped in a stolen hotel sheet.   
  
Caleb digs the salt and lighter fluid out of his rucksack, his movements so familiar that it’s only when he flicks back the lid of the canister that John realises what he’s about to do.   
  
“No.”  
  
Caleb looks up in surprise. “What? Why?”  
  
Why indeed?   
  
Because she was young and his shirt was too big for her and she ate the toppings off her pizza with her fingers before eating the crust.   
  
Because her hair was long and soft beneath his cheek and she never could wash the feel of her sister’s blood from hands scraped red-raw with trying.   
  
Because he can’t be angry with her for putting the gun to her head, not after he lifted her t-shirt to see the wounds oozing thick black blood.  
  
But mostly because he remembers the feel of her in his arms, this tiny bit of a girl, and he’s seen a lot in his time and the world is a fucked up place, but she knew what it was like to burn from the inside and he can’t watch her burn now.  
  
“I’ll come back later, if it needs to be done,” he says.   
  
Caleb’s eyes widen in silent understanding and he returns the salt and lighter fluid to the bag. “John…”   
  
He shakes his head. “I know what you’re thinking. And no, I didn’t.”   
  
It’s the truth, in most of the ways that matter.


End file.
